Related papers: Triangles, Fractales and Spaghetti
We use the idea of the broken stick problem (which goes back to Poincare) and calculate the corresponding probabilities for the cases in which the three broken part are: the medians in a triangle, the altitudes, radii of excircles, angle…
We present a variation of the broken stick problem in which $n$ stick lengths are sampled uniformly at random. We prove that the probability that no three sticks can form a triangle is the reciprocal of the product of the first $n$…
Break a stick at random at $n-1$ points to obtain $n$ pieces. We give an explicit formula for the probability that every choice of $k$ segments from this broken stick can form a $k$-gon, generalizing similar work. The method we use can be…
The broken stick problem is the following classical question. You have a segment $[0,1]$. You choose two points on this segment at random. They divide the segment into three smaller segments. Show that the probability that the three…
If a line cuts randomly two sides of a triangle, the length of the segment determined by the points of intersection is also random. The object of this study, applied to a particular case, is to calculate the probability that the length of…
A square trisection is a problem of assembling three identical squares from a larger square, using a minimal number of pieces. This paper presents an historical overview of the square trisection problem starting with its origins in the…
Percolation on a plane is usually associated with clusters spanning two opposite sides of a rectangular system. Here we investigate three-leg clusters generated on a square lattice and spanning the three sides of equilateral triangles. If…
Regard the closed interval $[0,1]$ as a stick. Partition $[0,1]$ into $n+1$ different intervals $I_1, \ \dots \ , I_{n+1},$ where $n \geq 2,$ which represent smaller sticks. The classical Broken Stick problem asks to find the probability…
In the first part of this paper, we obtain symmetric formulae for the probabilities that a plane convex body hits exactly 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6 triangles of a lattice of congruent triangles in the plane. Furthermore, a very simple formula for…
We prove that almost every triangle can be dissected only into $n^2$ triangles which have to be equal one another. Moreover, such a dissection is unique for every $n$. It turns out that to solve this "simple" problem it is convenient to use…
We propose a discrete approach to solve problems on forming polygons from broken sticks, which is akin to counting polygons with sides of integer length subject to certain Diophantine inequalities. Namely, we use MacMahon's Partition…
One of the most well known random fractals is the so-called Fractal percolation set. This is defined as follows: we divide the unique cube in $\mathbb{R}^d$ into $M^d$ congruent sub-cubes. For each of these cubes a certain retention…
A full solution to the recently proposed problem of determining the probability that no $k$-gon can be built from $n$ independently and uniformly chosen sticks in $[0,1]$ is proposed. This extends the known results for triangles and…
Given a triangle ABC, we derive the probability distribution function and the moments of the area of an inscribed triangle RST whose vertices are uniformly distributed on AB, BC, and CA. The theoretical results are confirmed by a Monte…
In 1994, Martin Gardner stated a set of questions concerning the dissection of a square or an equilateral triangle in three similar parts. Meanwhile, Gardner's questions have been generalized and some of them are already solved. In the…
We present two complementary proofs that, if the lengths of $n$ sticks are sampled at random, then the probability that no $p+1$ sticks can form a $(p+1)$-sided polygon can be expressed as the product of the reciprocals of a series of terms…
Let a stick be broken at random at n-1 points to form n pieces. We consider three problems on forming k-gons with k out of these n pieces, and show how a statistical approach, through a linear transformation of variables, yields simple…
Spontaneous symmetry breaking is a fundamental notion in modern physics, ranging from high energy to condensed matter. However, the usual spontaneous symmetry breaking only considers the equal probability to select the vacua. In this work,…
The equality constraint a+b+c=1 for random triangle sides corresponds to breaking a stick in two places. An analog a^2+b^2+c^2=1 has a remarkable feature: the bivariate density for angles coincides with that for 3D Gaussian triangles.…
In 1907, Henry Ernest Dudeney posed a puzzle: ``cut any equilateral triangle \dots\ into as few pieces as possible that will fit together and form a perfect square'' (without overlap, via translation and rotation). Four weeks later, Dudeney…